Climate change

Guardian - Standing in blinding sunlight on an archipelago above the Arctic Circle, the photographer Christian Åslund looked in shock at a glacier he had last visited in 2002. It had almost completely disappeared.Two decades ago Greenpeace asked Åslund to use photographs taken in the early 20th century, and photograph the same views in order to document how glaciers in Svalbard were melting due to global heating. The difference in ice density in those pictures, taken almost a century apart, was staggering.

This summer he visited those same places again, 22 years later, to find that the glaciers had visibly shrunk again. “In 2002, climate change wasn’t as well known as it is now, so that was a compete shock when we saw it,” he says. “And then I didn’t know what to expect going back this time. But seeing all the glaciers, we really saw the difference from these last 22 years. There is a massive amount of glacier ice that has disappeared.”

The disappearance of glaciers was one of the first signs that global heating caused by fossil fuel burning was rapidly affecting conditions on Earth. “It is sad,” says Åslund, “especially when you’re holding the historical picture in your hand and you see the whole fjord was from the glaciers and where the glaciers met, and you’re standing in the landscape when they were almost gone, in the same fjords.”